The Green Knight at Union South Marquee

Sir Gawain (Dev Patel) bows before the titular knight (Ralph Ineson) in the overgrowth of a small chapel, as golden light spills in.

“The Green Knight” is also screening at Union South Marquee on November 5 at 6 p.m.

David Lowery’s medieval art house fantasy The Green Knight (2021) asks its viewers to listen deeply to the breaths in between its siren calls as much as it commands observation of its treacherous cinematographic splendor—far beyond the conscious limitations of its sourced Arthurian adaptation.

In fact, Lowery’s contained epic unspools like the From Software version of that centuries-old Celtic tale and visual manifestation of Camelot. With the multi-platform release of runaway hit Elden Ring this past winter, those links hold even firmer in comparing their open worlds, the game’s Roundtable Hold, and the film’s wooded green chapel, which recalls the many churches strewn about The Lands Between. Like the best moments in the worlds of Hidetaka Miyazaki, The Green Knight is built on the pretensions of mysticism, dreaded dreams, and dark witticisms rather than pointedly dense orations or adherence to conventionally bloated motivations of high fantasy.

Daniel Hart’s score further evokes memories of the aforementioned game (with compositions by Tsukasa Saito) in the hushed, dissonant chants reverberating through foggy horizons and off-kilter semitone string phrasings that clash with the percussive snaps and rhythms of internal conflict. The music’s beckoning undulations always drums up those inner demons. So much of the film resides in subconscious life and death, soaked in the sex and violence of nature—rock, ash, water, vines, wood, blood, cum, amniotic fluid. The plot dissolves into a headless id, a flailing man (Dev Patel) in a kingdom of myth.

One of the most indelible films of last year.

—Grant Phipps